On Biography

Hebrews 11 is the divine mandate for Christians to reading biography. We should look to the heroes of the past and learn from them, and to do this, we are blessed with an abundance of good books we can read to learn from people who have lived an died, and now, because of their faith, live again.

Reading biography does have this impact on me, as i saw again reading a biography of John Macarthur by Iain Murray, and of CS Lewis by Alister McGrath. Two very different men, who lived very different lives in very different contexts, but loving and serving the same God.

These two men inspired me in different ways, Macarthur by illustrating that God will take care of the width of a ministry as long as you take care of the depth. Macarthur never would have guessed when he started as Pastor of Grace Church that decades later he'd have travelled the globe, preached through the new Testament, founded a college among much else. But his one desire, his one resolution was to preach the Gospel, and that's it. And that's what he did. In an area, and through a time when the Gospel waxed and waned in it's fashion, his devotion to it never waned. He stood in front of his people week after week and preached the Gospel. God took care, and takes care of the rest. The pressure to use quick growth gimmicks is something that will never go away, but Macarthur is a great example of how God's work does God's work.

If Macarthur's story is fairly straight forward, Lewis's is anything but. What are we to make of this enigma? The great strength of this book is that the author never knew the subject. CS Lewis is 'Lewis' all the way through, never 'Jack.' McGrath is also great at interacting with primary sources, leading him to re-date Lewis's conversion from theism to Christianity from early 1929 to mid 1930. Despite the unorthodox choices that Lewis made there is no doubt there he was a Christian. But Lewis's relationship with Mrs Moore, his clandestine marriage to Joy Davidman, and his sympathies with Catholicism do raise some flags. Lewis is not someone we should read for doctrinal clarity. His strength is in anything but, his strength is in his use of imagination and emotion to provide depth and clarity to truth. For that reason we should read Lewis, and his use of the mind in this area inspires me as much as Macarthur does in his preaching.

The great thing about biography is that it makes us think and it helps us to think. We can't be the major player when we're reading about other people. We are forced to see the world through another set of eyes, and this is necessary to our health as a Christian. It helps us to think about the world, to see the world differently and see our faith, to see our saviour from a different perspective.